


Roll in the Burlington

by breathedout



Category: Anne of Green Gables - L. M. Montgomery
Genre: F/F, I guess it's sort of career-driven loneliness?, O Canada, Unresolved Sexual Tension, fin de siecle, french canadians, hot tattoos, male impersonators, or at least adventure-driven solitude, presbyterians are not the only fruit, rural life, the magic of PEI, the magic of getting off PEI, turn of the century roadtrip, unhappy schoolteachers, unorthodox career options, vaudeville
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-22
Updated: 2012-12-22
Packaged: 2017-11-22 01:13:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,505
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/604189
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/breathedout/pseuds/breathedout
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Katherine Brooke, lately of Summerside, Prince Edward Island, stood for the seventeenth night running on a makeshift stage under crude footlights in a top hat and scarlet tails.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Roll in the Burlington

**Author's Note:**

  * For [evelyn_b](https://archiveofourown.org/users/evelyn_b/gifts).



> Evelyn! Have a Yuletide treat. This is not your regular assignment; just something that leapt into my brain one dark and stormy night, when I happened upon your request for Katherine Brooke living her life to the fullest. There are also some period details in there for your delectation.
> 
> Thanks a million to [greywash](http://archiveofourown.org/users/greywash/profile) for the quick beta, and also for the specific prompt and for egging me on. This story owes its existence to, in no particular order: her influence; evelyn_b's excellent and thoughtful [Dear Yuletide letter](http://evelyn-b.livejournal.com/38649.html); and rather more fancy holiday vodka than was really advisable to drink on a work night.

                                                                  _**I dress**_  
 _ **Up in fashion, and when I am feeling depressed,**_  
 ** _I shave from my cuff all the whiskers and fluff_  
** ** _Stick my hat on and toddle out West_**

  
Katherine Brooke, lately of Summerside, Prince Edward Island, stood for the seventeenth night running on a makeshift stage under crude footlights in a top hat and scarlet tails. And good grief, she thought, perspiring through the grease-paint on her face: where were they now? Bancroft? Apsley? She had lost track someplace just west of Mont-Laurier, when the place-names had turned English again, and the churches respectable.  
  
Protestant, she corrected herself. She squinted out at the audience. Martine had thrown her out of the wagon for three days for implying that Papist churches weren’t respectable.  
  
The crowd shifted, below her. The men jeered. Scratched themselves through their woolens. A woman just in front of Katherine spat tobacco juice on the floor, then grinned into her face. She kept expecting to feel disgusted.  
  
But she smiled down at them, her blood beating in her ears. Remembering all the drab evenings of all the drab years in Mrs. Dennis’s drab boarding-house. At least, thought Katherine, in Bancroft or Apsley or Mont-Laurier a body could pack up her things and fly.  
  
Tommy let his accordion fall open on his lap. He braced his arms and coaxed out warm tones through the reeds.  
  
Katherine swaggered into the spotlight, one hand to her top-hat and one to her heart, like either might grow wings. She began to sing.

* * *

  
**_I'm all airs and graces, correct easy paces_ **  
_**Without food so long I've forgot where my face is**_

  
It had all started, she supposed, that Christmas two years prior, when Anne Shirley had taken her to stay at Green Gables. Sometime after the carriage ride, she thought: after the bear hugs and the flurry of gossip. After the full moon on the new-fallen snow in the little grove Anne insisted on calling ‘Lover’s Lane’; even—incongruously—when Anne was traveling through it with the likes of Katherine Brooke. Yes, she supposed it had been then—snow-shoeing through the grove in kit borrowed from a bosom friend of the incorrigible Anne Shirley’s—that something inside her had broken apart.  
  
‘When _you_ come home, Anne, everything seems to come _alive_ ,” Katherine had parroted one night, days later, screwing her mouth up in the ancient half-mirror in the guest room at the top of Green Gables. She had imitated the twin Davy and had tried for sarcasm, but she hadn’t achieved it, not quite. For one thing, Davy reminded her of herself, somehow.  
  
For another, those few days had been so—Katherine had realized with a shock that she couldn’t remember people ever touching her as they did at Green Gables. The way Anne’s beau had cupped his hand under Katherine’s when he’d passed her her cup of cider, making certain she had a grip on it before he let go. The way Mrs. Lynde, gruff and grumbling, had tucked her new-made afghan around Katherine’s shoulders; fussing that city folks, she did declare, shivered at the slightest chill; her knuckles brushing the bare skin of Katherine’s nape.  
  
And despite Anne’s unbearable earnestness, and her romantic claptrap, and her inimitable grating optimism, Katherine had thought, that first night, just for a moment—  
  
And then she had returned to Summerside; and nothing had looked quite the same.

* * *

  
**_She’s got so much 'oof', she sleeps on the roof_ **  
**_And I live in the room over her._ **

  
_Dearest Anne_ , Katherine had written, weeks ago now, scribbling in the back of the wagon to the light of the oil lamp she’d insisted on buying in Smith’s Falls. _You will be pleased, I hope, to learn that I have secured a position as a secretary, to an MP from Quebec. A veritable globe-trotter! I suppose I will finally be able to travel.  
  
_ Which was true insofar as Martine Poulin, who held the traveling company’s purse strings and doubled as their Illustrated Woman, hailed originally from somewhere near Trois Rivières; and also true insofar as the etymology of _secretary_ was from the Latin for _confidante; someone entrusted with a secret_. Such, Katherine reflected, was the kind of information one tended to absorb, when one spent the long summer nights of one’s girlhood locked in a garret room with only a Bible and a dictionary for company.  
  
Come to that, it was even true that Tommy had painted a globe on the side of the wagon. Although expecting Monsieur to achieve anything resembling a trot, even with the enticement of sugar cubes to hand, would be optimistic to the point of absurdity.  
  
Anne, Katherine thought—ruining her claim to virtue by adding an entirely fictitious line about a diplomatic mission to Egypt, and distracted by the tattooed headless angel that flexed its wings on Martine’s bare shoulder-blade when she pulled on her shift—Anne would probably coax one out of him anyhow.

* * *

_  
**My pose, though ironical**_  
 **_Shows that my monocle_**  
 **_Holds up my face, keeps it in place,_**  
 **_Stops it from slipping away._**  
  
  
It was sometimes humiliating to remember, though somehow it hadn’t been at the time: how Katherine had wept; how she had wept, two years ago, on the night of the snow-shoeing excursion. She had wept, and she hadn’t wanted to, and she hadn’t been able to stop. And ridiculous Anne had seemed so sincere, so distraught; and there had been freckles across the bridge of her nose and a lock of hair blowing free in front of her eyes, and she had said with spectacular naïveté to _let life in_. She hadn’t even reached up to push the hair away. It had made Katherine’s blood ache dully in her veins; she had cried harder, and she had wanted, she had wanted—  
  
Good grief, she thought, somehow remembering all this and still swinging her cane at a jaunty angle, here on the stage in Apsley, lifting her chin as she hit the high note on _Rolllllll in the Burlington_ , and the crowd hurrahed.  
  
Never mind what Katherine had wanted.

* * *

  
_**If they ever knew I'd been talking to you  
Why they'd never look at me again** _

  
In a fisherman’s pub in the Bay of Fundy, truly drunk for the first time in her life as spring eased slowly into summer, Katherine had fumbled her new friend’s hand, and tried to explain about the coat she was wearing, and the irony of Anne Shirley. 

She tried to tell about—about her graduation from secretarial college, because Anne, you see (and her new friend nodded, encouragingly), Anne had come to see it, the—the graduation, Katherine meant. She had come all the way from Summerside to Redmond, even though she, Anne that is, was planning her wedding at the same time, and everyone knew how much effort that required, well, everyone except Katherine, because as her friend had probably guessed after listening to Katherine for five minutes, she, Katherine that is, had never been married, herself.  
  
Well. Who would have her? Katherine had asked. Who indeed?  
  
Her new friend made a tutting noise, as if she couldn’t believe that Katherine wasn’t pestered with offers of marriage every other afternoon. Katherine felt tears start in her eyes.  
  
‘You don’t understand,’ Katherine had said, trying to inject a note of gruff reality into the proceedings. ‘I’ve always—always _hated_ men.’  
  
‘ _Oui_ ,’ her new friend had said. ‘I am sure you have reason,’ and had lain her other hand on top of Katherine’s on top of the china-blue mermaid inked into the woman’s right forearm.  
  
The point, Katherine had said then, her tongue thick and her head very heavy, the _point_ , was that Katherine was a new graduate now, and had planned this trip across the bay as a treat to herself. Like all new graduates did, she added, defiantly. But now, you see, in the wake of Anne’s kind visit and, then, of course, in the wake of her inevitable departure, Katherine had felt a bit down. Yes; a bit down. To be honest, Katherine went on, it was very cold here in Saint John, and Katherine’s boarding-house was very drab, and you see, Katherine had a certain _history_ with drab boarding-houses, and she had begun to feel that nothing would make much difference after all, you know, not her diploma or anything, and so she had set out on foot, and goodness, Katherine said, this story was meandering, she had only been trying to explain about Anne, and how she, Katherine herself, she meant, had come into this men’s red coat.  
  
The story was a good one! Katherine had assured her friend. It was like a—like a joke, and Katherine had never been any great shakes at telling jokes, which was undoubtedly the problem now, because (and her friend had looked concerned, and helped Katherine to her feet) you see, Anne had always told Katherine she should wear red, but she hadn’t meant, you see, Anne was so graceful, so girlish, she didn’t understand, she—  
  
Katherine had been so woozy. She had watched the door loom up ahead, leaning into the side of her new friend as the other woman walked for them both. All across her friend’s left shoulder was a clipper ship, red and black in full sail. Katherine put her head on it. She thought she could almost feel the sails snap, taut against her mouth.  
  
In the fresh air Katherine was horrified to realize that she was still talking. She was telling her new friend that Anne—Anne had said ‘You have such lovely hair, Katherine. Do you mind if I try a new way of doing it?’ And she had said, you know, her hands in Katherine’s hair: ‘Heaven grant me patience! Clothes are _very_ important.’ But she would never have thought, Katherine said, holding onto her friend’s shirt for balance, it was so amusing because Anne would never have thought of Katherine buying such a thing as this, because she, Anne that is, she hadn’t—she couldn’t—  
  
Katherine had been sick by the rubbish bins. It was disgraceful. She would be an outcast now, and a reprobate. Someone was petting her head.  
  
‘Mademoiselle Brooke,’ Martine had said, when Katherine had straightened up. ‘Tomorrow morning, _oui_? I also have an idea about a new way of doing your hair.’

* * *

_  
**I can't let my man see me**_  
 **_in bed with a gee-gee_**  
  
  
The galling thing was, it wasn’t as if Anne were a Pringle. Not a golden child, not handed life on a platter; as Anne had made quite clear that first winter at Green Gables.  
  
Nor had Katherine been able to forget it at any later juncture. She’d had an insufferable third-year girl in her office for the better part of two hours one day last year, crying and carrying on, with her nose running all over Katherine’s starched handkerchief. Telling her how Miss Shirley had overcome great odds; how Miss Shirley said to look on the bright side of life although Miss Shirley was a poor orphan without a dime to her name; how Miss Shirley said they should all close their eyes and put their heads down on their desks and imagine themselves in an elf kingdom or some such nonsense; Katherine wasn’t entirely sure.  
  
To be honest, Katherine had stopped paying attention once the clock had passed six, which was the time she normally set out for home. Though: she hadn’t made the girl leave, had she? She had sat behind her desk, and watched the child’s eyes get redder and puffier, and listened to her talk about Miss Shirley’s smile and Miss Shirley’s kindness and Miss Shirley’s lovely auburn hair, without once correcting her to say it was flame-red.  
  
Katherine had thought, watching the sun set over the bay through the window behind the girl’s head, that she wouldn’t darken Anne’s hair by a shade. She had thought about the freckles on Anne’s throat, and she had thought about the prospect of teaching Summerside High School students for the rest of her days, and she had reckoned that if Anne thought Katherine had it in her to get off Prince Edward Island, then Katherine had better get on and do it, before some grave misfortune befell them all.

* * *

****

                                                            **_I walk_**  
 ** _down the Strand with my gloves on my hand_**  
 ** _Then I walk down again with them off_**

  
If Renfrew and West Nipissing weren’t precisely what Katherine had had in mind, as a girl, when she’d lain back in her garret bed and dreamt of travel—and Katherine was sufficiently frank with herself to admit that they in fact were not—Martine assured her that after Sault Ste. Marie it was their practice to dip south, and travel back east on the other side of the border. So Katherine would, at least, get to take in Chicago, and Detroit, and Niagara Falls, and sing suggestively of men and maidens in the small towns surrounding those cities, before the company headed back up north to batten down for the winter in Martine’s aunt’s rambling old house outside Saint-Jérôme.  
  
Katherine wondered how it would be: the three of them and Tante Poulin, sleeping in real beds each night while the snow piled up outside their windows. But she wondered it an unhurried, lazy sort of way. It was difficult to believe in such a winter on a day like this, with all the wide rolling browning prairie beneath her feet, and above her a vast deep blue.  
  
She’d never have had such a thought, before Anne.  
  
Up ahead somewhere was Tommy. He would run a mile with the dogs; then stop to work on their routines. Or he would set them to chase squirrels, and Martine and Katherine would come upon him in a clearing, juggling stones and pine cones and whatever he could find. Martine would bray like a donkey, which was her way of laughing. She would yell ‘ _Vite_!’ and he would do it faster; and she would yell ‘ _Vite_! _Vite_!’ and he’d go faster, and impossibly faster until he had to roll out of the way laughing so as not to have falling river rocks hit him on the head.  
  
Martine and Katherine walked by the wagon-side. Katherine wore her ragged teaching clothes, to save her trousers and her scarlet coat for the performance. Sometimes, when they passed a stream, Martine drew up her skirts around the hooks and lines and inked fish all up her legs, and ducked into the shade in the shallows to come up with wildflowers for Katherine’s shorn hair. For the rest of the afternoon, Katherine would move her head and breathe in the smell of summersweet.  
  
Anne would like it, Katherine thought: the beauty and the sweet smells and the open air. The adventure. Anne would imagine things that Katherine would never think to imagine. But Katherine was content, somehow, that Anne was at home, on the Island; and that Katherine, turning up her head to the sky, found herself here.

**Author's Note:**

> The title and lyrics (with slight changes) are from the music-hall tune “[Burlington Bertie from Bow](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hb1VavOM2uc),” made famous by the turn-of-the-century male impersonator Ella Shields. Thanks to [Songster’s Miscellany](http://songstersmiscellany.tumblr.com) for turning me on to Shields and her repertoire. This song is ostensibly about a poverty-stricken man with pretensions to gentility, though when performed by a drag king it’s hard to ignore the fact that “Burlington Hunt” is Cockney rhyming slang for “cunt,” and that while “gee-gee” is slang for a horse, “gee” is slang for vagina. 
> 
> This author’s note is now officially higher-rated than the story. Oops.
> 
> In compensation, please enjoy [this gorgeous 1907 image](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/0a/Woman_with_upper_body_tattooed_1907_cph.3a01441.jpg/421px-Woman_with_upper_body_tattooed_1907_cph.3a01441.jpg) of a woman with full-torso tattoos.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[PODFIC] Roll in the Burlington by breathedout](https://archiveofourown.org/works/8804107) by [joyinrepetition](https://archiveofourown.org/users/joyinrepetition/pseuds/joyinrepetition)




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